8 ms·

Why laptop support, why now: FreeBSD's strategic move toward broader adoption

71 points by mav3ri3k 2y ago

beeflet 2y ago
I think that a major problem is that you can't legally force vendors to open source the drivers they distribute. Most importantly wifi drivers which are critical to making an operating system that people can actually use.
- pxc 2y ago
  Isn't Android plagued by all manner of proprietary dependencies for hardware support? I don't understand all of the pressures on vendors in the Linux case, but at least one of them is that they can't upstream their drivers (and thus unload some of their maintenance burden on the Linux kernel team) unless they license them in a way that's considered suitable by upstream. If they don't do that, they're more likely to be broken by Linux changes, and it makes distributing their drivers more annoying because they have to do that on their own. I also vaguely recall that there are some other ways that proprietary drivers have more limited access to the Linux kernel, of access more liable to get broken by upstream, but idrk. But isn't the biggest incentive for releasing your drivers as F/OSS (so you can upstream, making maintenance easier) still there in the FreeBSD case?
  - ywvcbk 2y ago
    > . If they don't do that, they're more likely to be broken by Linux changes, and it makes distributing their drivers more annoying So the idea is that having no drivers is better than having proprietary drivers? Seems like a perfectly reasonable and sensible approach..
    - exe34 2y ago
      having no drivers and having drivers that no longer work because the source isn't available and the maintainers can't update them is functionality identical.
      - ywvcbk 2y ago
        Maybe they should stop breaking them then? That’s a design decision, Linux maintainers decided to not have a stable ABI because they’d rather have no drivers at all than proprietary ones.
        seba_dos1 2y ago
        The only decision to be made there is when to break them, not if. Linux went with "sooner than later".
        exe34 2y ago
        if you prefer to have security vulnerabilities, you can always pin your kernel version? the kernel needs to keep evolving, and the maintainers will keep your code updated for free - you just have to open source it.
    - pxc 2y ago
      It's a tautology that only open-source drivers will be part of the codebase of an open-source OS. It's also more or less a given that first-party code will be better-integrated into an OS than third-party code is. That was a prevailing element of the discourse surrounding the outage CrowdStrike induced on Windows weeks ago, for instance. That's not a proposition unique to open-source operating systems. Indeed, what is unique to open-source is that is possible for outside vendors (or individuals) to put their code through a process that eventually gets it that maximal level of integration. So, uh... no?
- psychoslave 2y ago
  Laws come and go. Forcing hardware vendor to disclose all information necessary to build drivers is something that is perfectly plausible to enact for example in the frame of a right to repair/maintain the hardware customers buy. Note that it doesn’t need to be forcing to open source the vendor own implementation of any driver.
  - anonzzzies 2y ago
    Yes, this is very plausible considering laws are in the making that forbid bricking of a device by stopping software support or remotely disabling it etc. Seems the only way to fix that is providing enough info to maintain yourself.
- lproven 2y ago
  > you can't legally force vendors to open source the drivers they distribute You can't, no, but that is looking at the wrong end of the problem. What you can do is say, "we are the government of $X and we buy $Y billion of $currency of equipment per year, every year, and we will only buy from vendors who make all their drivers and firmware FOSS." Then vendors will fall over one another in their haste to get a slice of that pie. This is how we got desktop power management: the US Gov't Energy Star initiative. This is why A/UX happened and how Apple got into UNIX: the US Army required POSIX as a condition of purchase. Result, indirectly: OS X.
- stiray 2y ago
  With FreeBSD they dont need to make it open source.
oldpersonintx 2y ago
[dead]
mmooss 2y ago
> organizations prioritizing endpoint security increasingly look to FreeBSD for its secure and stable environment What is the story there? I've heard nothing about it. It would be an incredible development.
- Gud 2y ago
  Many organisations build FreeBSD firewalls. I don’t know how it’s now, but for example the Swedish armed forces were using a software called Färist which was based on FreeBSD. I helped set it up during an exercise when I was a wee conscript.
DeathArrow 2y ago
$750000 seems very little amount for this task. I think they should somehow attract companies to invest in FreeBSD development. Apart from laptop support, FreeBSD is missing important things on server side suck as lack of support for Kubernetes. This is hindering FreeBSD adoption, too.
- pmlnr 2y ago
  FreeBSD has jails if you need lightweight vms. The kubernetes monoculture is a horrible thing for long term.
  - kortilla 2y ago
    Jails are akin to containers, not kubernetes. The value of k8s over just docker or whatever container runtime is in the lifecycle management, service mesh, scaling, monitoring, etc.
    - whizzter 2y ago
      Even without Kubernetes this kinda was indicative of the FreeBSD community missing the point, jails are neat but docker added a lot of ease of use above the how you basically managed jails manually (at least according to official instructions), people just kept mentioning that the capability had been there but missed that the ease of use was what charmed developers. Also hurting it was that the Docker story on FreeBSD is had attempts to make it "native", through the Linux emulation layer with ZFS native functionality to handle the VFS parts and while that could have been elegant it required cutting edge and afaik never got really production ready (There's apparently docker port now via VirtualBox).
_paulc 2y ago
As a long term FreeBSD user (since 2.0) and advocate, my view is that FreeBSD should focus on its niche as a rock-solid server operating system. For most developers buying a MacBook and SSH-ing into a server is probably the right answer (or running a VM if you really need something local). The level of effort to match the MacBook user experience feels like a lost cause (Linux has been trying to do this for decades with significantly more resources) and it would feel more useful to use this funding to focus on the server side.
- pjmlp 2y ago
  On my bubble it is more like buying Windows laptops.
- whizzter 2y ago
  I'm so much on the cliff on this, whilst they should focus it's becoming more painful by the year to run stuff on FreeBSD since there is so may Linux:isms in most opensource projects today that it's almost as hard to compile on FreeBSD as it was to compile on Windows 20 years ago. Only a month or two back I gave up on compiling Samba myself (mostly worked w/o issues in the past just with ./configure && make), relying on package/ports instead. Modern dotnet versions are finally available (but the compilation instructions looked headache inducing), node.js filesystem watching seems broken/nonexistant (using webpack -w i had to enable some polling mode). I love FreeBSD but Linux has EEE'd the OSS ecosystem. (Embrace, Extend, Extinguish)
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    Kind of, on embedded space, other kernels and FOSS operating systems are shaping up, none of them using GPL derived licenses.
- Gud 2y ago
  As another long term FreeBSD user(4.6), you can pry FreeBSD from my lap/desktops from my cold, dead, fingers. What improvements are you looking for on the server side? Seems to me this money will do wonders for the client side, while on the server side, FreeBSD is already miles ahead of the competition.
olavgg 2y ago
For the last 5 years, I have replaced FreeBSD on servers with Linux. The main reason is that Linux, is a lot less work. The time spent on upgrading for example Debian is significantly less than FreeBSD which has a cumbersome process which requires some manual human interaction a few times during the process. Another thing is that behaviour of some applications I write are different on FreeBSD compared to Linux. One pain point I recently struggled with was RocksDB with Rust, data got corrupted.. But the same code works great with Linux. I really like FreeBSD, but I do not have time for it anymore. I really think FreeBSD is important, and I appriciate all the great work. But it needs to help me save my time. I think spending effort and money on getting it to run better on laptops will not help adaptation. We have macs, which are a lot better than anything else at the moment. Even Linux on a laptop is a painful experience.
- kmarc 2y ago
  Switching (back) from om Mac to Linux, I can definitely say that the painful experience was with the Mac, I just got used to it along the years. The Plasma desktop is now a breeze (literally ;-)). Battery is surprisingly long lasting, too (7 year old Thinkpad X1, easily 7-8h of battery). It just works.
  - fransje26 2y ago
    Out of curiosity, which flavour of Linux are you running?
    - kmarc 2y ago
      Arch. Used to use sway, now plasma 6
- nonrandomstring 2y ago
  So true! My family have a secret holiday destination. It has unspoiled beaches, friendly locals, cheap beer, amazing restaurants. When people ask where we went for summer we lie. "Oh we went to Ibiza again". Some things are best kept for yourself, not to be popular. We don't want "those sorts" dragging the whole show down to the lowest common denominator. So listen to the parent poster, and trust me, BSD is a piece of crap. It barely works. the documentation sucks. And it definitely is no use for servers, desktops, laptops or embedded systems. Go where the crowds are! Linux has something for everyone, with over 8 million lines of code in the kernel! You never know, you might even meet a celebrity like Lennart Poettering hanging around your hotel.
jaza 2y ago
Can / does asterisk-BSD share many hardware drivers with Linux? IMHO that's the only way asterisk-BSD is to have any hope of catching up in the laptop space.
- vermaden 2y ago
  FreeBSD already uses GPU drivers from Linux and also starts to use Linux WiFi drivers.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
jensenbox 2y ago
I could be alone in this, but I think getting containers (OCI, Docker) running on FreeBSD seems like a better direction - I totally get that Docker is a Linux kernel thing but the idea of a file system with layers, registries etc could be a thing right? I love FreeBSD but cannot really use it in a production environment until I can deploy containers on it as that is pretty much the defacto for our workflow. Maybe it is impossible.
- acsowerby 2y ago
  Hi! You may be pleased to hear that this is an active area of development, in fact there is currently a testing project for Podman on FreeBSD, you can find out more here https://github.com/oci-playground/freebsd-podman-testing https://github.com/oci-playground/freebsd-podman-testing
- Gud 2y ago
  FreeBSD has supported containers since the 90s.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
    It would, however, be immensely useful to complete the work to run containerd with OCI images on top of jails, to the point that it's just a `pkg install`.
    - Gud 2y ago
      Agree
  - leansensei 2y ago
    And it has 5-6 different ways for managing jails, some of them abandoned, others peculiar, and some recently degrading in quality.
    - Gud 2y ago
      There are 100s of ways of managing anything, what’s your point here? I find using FreeBSD jails to be extremely straightforward. https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/jails/ https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/jails/
SuperNinKenDo 2y ago
Personally, I think this is a good call. People have a tendency to go with what they know and feel competent in. As people move more and more toward using laptops as their primary or only workstation device, the chances that admins or enthusiasts will choose FreeBSD as their go-to server diminishes if FreeBSD isn't what they're doing their primary computing through. Constant context switching is also made more difficult when you're using a very similar, yet oh so slightly different system, where many familiar commands are present, do basically the same thing, but take different arguments, have the same arguments do different things, or behave in very subtly different ways from your main computing device. Of course, I'm assuming the admin or enthusiast is using Linux on their main machine. I actually think the structure of BSD projects could be better suited to building laptop support than something more fragmentary like Linux. It doesn't have the same resources, but it can wield those resources in a more concerted manner to support specific models very well, in a way that the structure of the Linux project doesn't facilitate nearly so well. Could be interesting if handled well.
pjmlp 2y ago
Laptops are the new desktops for many organisations, so this is actually quite relevant.
- whizzter 2y ago
  Apart from some console/game dev, I haven't had my main computer be anything other than a laptop for almost 25 years at this point.
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    For me the transition took place in 2002 privately, and since 2006 at work.
kkfx 2y ago
Microsoft triumphed back than because it try to conquer students, desktops, old big-iron Unix players fall because they ignore it, so the move is logic but the main issue for FreeBSD are not much laptop/wifi but mere modern iron generic support and power management just for the hw, for the software the issue is that maintaining a FreeBSD desktop means more work to keep the system up to date than Arch. Since they have no license issues they should focused on: - zfs crypto root (native or geli, does not matter) by default, supported in the installer; - boot environments support with zfs clones, as normal way to update the system; - zfs integrated jails for software development (like IllumOS zones) focused on exposing a controlled set of package in a local cloned FHS to offer the equivalent of NixOS/Guix shell; - easy creation of custom images, as easy as NixOS; - curated minimalistic desktop offer (Emacs/EXWM, i3 or another tiling WM, fluxbox with ALL relevant modern desktop stuff (like dunst already there for notifications, udiskie for manage removable storage, a nice network manager GUI of some kind, ...) and a good XFCE setup by default. There is no need for more, but there is a big need of sane defaults and meta-packages selections. These would be the real "basic stuff we need to succeed" like the SUN OpenSolaris Indiana move back then, ditching from the old SXDE/SXCE model for a modern FLOSS familiar one, but with the best tools GNU/Linux do not have.

71 points by mav3ri3k 2y ago

I think that a major problem is that you can't legally force vendors to open source the drivers they distribute. Most importantly wifi drivers which are critical to making an operating system that people can actually use.

pxc 2y ago
Isn't Android plagued by all manner of proprietary dependencies for hardware support? I don't understand all of the pressures on vendors in the Linux case, but at least one of them is that they can't upstream their drivers (and thus unload some of their maintenance burden on the Linux kernel team) unless they license them in a way that's considered suitable by upstream. If they don't do that, they're more likely to be broken by Linux changes, and it makes distributing their drivers more annoying because they have to do that on their own. I also vaguely recall that there are some other ways that proprietary drivers have more limited access to the Linux kernel, of access more liable to get broken by upstream, but idrk. But isn't the biggest incentive for releasing your drivers as F/OSS (so you can upstream, making maintenance easier) still there in the FreeBSD case?
- ywvcbk 2y ago
  > . If they don't do that, they're more likely to be broken by Linux changes, and it makes distributing their drivers more annoying So the idea is that having no drivers is better than having proprietary drivers? Seems like a perfectly reasonable and sensible approach..
  - exe34 2y ago
    having no drivers and having drivers that no longer work because the source isn't available and the maintainers can't update them is functionality identical.
    - ywvcbk 2y ago
      Maybe they should stop breaking them then? That’s a design decision, Linux maintainers decided to not have a stable ABI because they’d rather have no drivers at all than proprietary ones.
      - seba_dos1 2y ago
        The only decision to be made there is when to break them, not if. Linux went with "sooner than later".
      - exe34 2y ago
        if you prefer to have security vulnerabilities, you can always pin your kernel version? the kernel needs to keep evolving, and the maintainers will keep your code updated for free - you just have to open source it.
  - pxc 2y ago
    It's a tautology that only open-source drivers will be part of the codebase of an open-source OS. It's also more or less a given that first-party code will be better-integrated into an OS than third-party code is. That was a prevailing element of the discourse surrounding the outage CrowdStrike induced on Windows weeks ago, for instance. That's not a proposition unique to open-source operating systems. Indeed, what is unique to open-source is that is possible for outside vendors (or individuals) to put their code through a process that eventually gets it that maximal level of integration. So, uh... no?
psychoslave 2y ago
Laws come and go. Forcing hardware vendor to disclose all information necessary to build drivers is something that is perfectly plausible to enact for example in the frame of a right to repair/maintain the hardware customers buy. Note that it doesn’t need to be forcing to open source the vendor own implementation of any driver.
- anonzzzies 2y ago
  Yes, this is very plausible considering laws are in the making that forbid bricking of a device by stopping software support or remotely disabling it etc. Seems the only way to fix that is providing enough info to maintain yourself.
lproven 2y ago
> you can't legally force vendors to open source the drivers they distribute You can't, no, but that is looking at the wrong end of the problem. What you can do is say, "we are the government of $X and we buy $Y billion of $currency of equipment per year, every year, and we will only buy from vendors who make all their drivers and firmware FOSS." Then vendors will fall over one another in their haste to get a slice of that pie. This is how we got desktop power management: the US Gov't Energy Star initiative. This is why A/UX happened and how Apple got into UNIX: the US Army required POSIX as a condition of purchase. Result, indirectly: OS X.
stiray 2y ago
With FreeBSD they dont need to make it open source.

oldpersonintx 2y ago

[dead]

mmooss 2y ago

> organizations prioritizing endpoint security increasingly look to FreeBSD for its secure and stable environment What is the story there? I've heard nothing about it. It would be an incredible development.

Gud 2y ago
Many organisations build FreeBSD firewalls. I don’t know how it’s now, but for example the Swedish armed forces were using a software called Färist which was based on FreeBSD. I helped set it up during an exercise when I was a wee conscript.

DeathArrow 2y ago

$750000 seems very little amount for this task. I think they should somehow attract companies to invest in FreeBSD development. Apart from laptop support, FreeBSD is missing important things on server side suck as lack of support for Kubernetes. This is hindering FreeBSD adoption, too.

pmlnr 2y ago
FreeBSD has jails if you need lightweight vms. The kubernetes monoculture is a horrible thing for long term.
- kortilla 2y ago
  Jails are akin to containers, not kubernetes. The value of k8s over just docker or whatever container runtime is in the lifecycle management, service mesh, scaling, monitoring, etc.
  - whizzter 2y ago
    Even without Kubernetes this kinda was indicative of the FreeBSD community missing the point, jails are neat but docker added a lot of ease of use above the how you basically managed jails manually (at least according to official instructions), people just kept mentioning that the capability had been there but missed that the ease of use was what charmed developers. Also hurting it was that the Docker story on FreeBSD is had attempts to make it "native", through the Linux emulation layer with ZFS native functionality to handle the VFS parts and while that could have been elegant it required cutting edge and afaik never got really production ready (There's apparently docker port now via VirtualBox).

_paulc 2y ago

As a long term FreeBSD user (since 2.0) and advocate, my view is that FreeBSD should focus on its niche as a rock-solid server operating system. For most developers buying a MacBook and SSH-ing into a server is probably the right answer (or running a VM if you really need something local). The level of effort to match the MacBook user experience feels like a lost cause (Linux has been trying to do this for decades with significantly more resources) and it would feel more useful to use this funding to focus on the server side.

pjmlp 2y ago
On my bubble it is more like buying Windows laptops.
whizzter 2y ago
I'm so much on the cliff on this, whilst they should focus it's becoming more painful by the year to run stuff on FreeBSD since there is so may Linux:isms in most opensource projects today that it's almost as hard to compile on FreeBSD as it was to compile on Windows 20 years ago. Only a month or two back I gave up on compiling Samba myself (mostly worked w/o issues in the past just with ./configure && make), relying on package/ports instead. Modern dotnet versions are finally available (but the compilation instructions looked headache inducing), node.js filesystem watching seems broken/nonexistant (using webpack -w i had to enable some polling mode). I love FreeBSD but Linux has EEE'd the OSS ecosystem. (Embrace, Extend, Extinguish)
- pjmlp 2y ago
  Kind of, on embedded space, other kernels and FOSS operating systems are shaping up, none of them using GPL derived licenses.
Gud 2y ago
As another long term FreeBSD user(4.6), you can pry FreeBSD from my lap/desktops from my cold, dead, fingers. What improvements are you looking for on the server side? Seems to me this money will do wonders for the client side, while on the server side, FreeBSD is already miles ahead of the competition.

olavgg 2y ago

For the last 5 years, I have replaced FreeBSD on servers with Linux. The main reason is that Linux, is a lot less work. The time spent on upgrading for example Debian is significantly less than FreeBSD which has a cumbersome process which requires some manual human interaction a few times during the process. Another thing is that behaviour of some applications I write are different on FreeBSD compared to Linux. One pain point I recently struggled with was RocksDB with Rust, data got corrupted.. But the same code works great with Linux. I really like FreeBSD, but I do not have time for it anymore. I really think FreeBSD is important, and I appriciate all the great work. But it needs to help me save my time. I think spending effort and money on getting it to run better on laptops will not help adaptation. We have macs, which are a lot better than anything else at the moment. Even Linux on a laptop is a painful experience.

kmarc 2y ago
Switching (back) from om Mac to Linux, I can definitely say that the painful experience was with the Mac, I just got used to it along the years. The Plasma desktop is now a breeze (literally ;-)). Battery is surprisingly long lasting, too (7 year old Thinkpad X1, easily 7-8h of battery). It just works.
- fransje26 2y ago
  Out of curiosity, which flavour of Linux are you running?
  - kmarc 2y ago
    Arch. Used to use sway, now plasma 6
nonrandomstring 2y ago
So true! My family have a secret holiday destination. It has unspoiled beaches, friendly locals, cheap beer, amazing restaurants. When people ask where we went for summer we lie. "Oh we went to Ibiza again". Some things are best kept for yourself, not to be popular. We don't want "those sorts" dragging the whole show down to the lowest common denominator. So listen to the parent poster, and trust me, BSD is a piece of crap. It barely works. the documentation sucks. And it definitely is no use for servers, desktops, laptops or embedded systems. Go where the crowds are! Linux has something for everyone, with over 8 million lines of code in the kernel! You never know, you might even meet a celebrity like Lennart Poettering hanging around your hotel.

jaza 2y ago

Can / does asterisk-BSD share many hardware drivers with Linux? IMHO that's the only way asterisk-BSD is to have any hope of catching up in the laptop space.

vermaden 2y ago
FreeBSD already uses GPU drivers from Linux and also starts to use Linux WiFi drivers.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

jensenbox 2y ago

I could be alone in this, but I think getting containers (OCI, Docker) running on FreeBSD seems like a better direction - I totally get that Docker is a Linux kernel thing but the idea of a file system with layers, registries etc could be a thing right? I love FreeBSD but cannot really use it in a production environment until I can deploy containers on it as that is pretty much the defacto for our workflow. Maybe it is impossible.

acsowerby 2y ago
Hi! You may be pleased to hear that this is an active area of development, in fact there is currently a testing project for Podman on FreeBSD, you can find out more here https://github.com/oci-playground/freebsd-podman-testing https://github.com/oci-playground/freebsd-podman-testing
Gud 2y ago
FreeBSD has supported containers since the 90s.
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
  It would, however, be immensely useful to complete the work to run containerd with OCI images on top of jails, to the point that it's just a `pkg install`.
  - Gud 2y ago
    Agree
- leansensei 2y ago
  And it has 5-6 different ways for managing jails, some of them abandoned, others peculiar, and some recently degrading in quality.
  - Gud 2y ago
    There are 100s of ways of managing anything, what’s your point here? I find using FreeBSD jails to be extremely straightforward. https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/jails/ https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/jails/

SuperNinKenDo 2y ago

Personally, I think this is a good call. People have a tendency to go with what they know and feel competent in. As people move more and more toward using laptops as their primary or only workstation device, the chances that admins or enthusiasts will choose FreeBSD as their go-to server diminishes if FreeBSD isn't what they're doing their primary computing through. Constant context switching is also made more difficult when you're using a very similar, yet oh so slightly different system, where many familiar commands are present, do basically the same thing, but take different arguments, have the same arguments do different things, or behave in very subtly different ways from your main computing device. Of course, I'm assuming the admin or enthusiast is using Linux on their main machine. I actually think the structure of BSD projects could be better suited to building laptop support than something more fragmentary like Linux. It doesn't have the same resources, but it can wield those resources in a more concerted manner to support specific models very well, in a way that the structure of the Linux project doesn't facilitate nearly so well. Could be interesting if handled well.

pjmlp 2y ago

Laptops are the new desktops for many organisations, so this is actually quite relevant.

whizzter 2y ago
Apart from some console/game dev, I haven't had my main computer be anything other than a laptop for almost 25 years at this point.
- pjmlp 2y ago
  For me the transition took place in 2002 privately, and since 2006 at work.

kkfx 2y ago

Microsoft triumphed back than because it try to conquer students, desktops, old big-iron Unix players fall because they ignore it, so the move is logic but the main issue for FreeBSD are not much laptop/wifi but mere modern iron generic support and power management just for the hw, for the software the issue is that maintaining a FreeBSD desktop means more work to keep the system up to date than Arch. Since they have no license issues they should focused on: - zfs crypto root (native or geli, does not matter) by default, supported in the installer; - boot environments support with zfs clones, as normal way to update the system; - zfs integrated jails for software development (like IllumOS zones) focused on exposing a controlled set of package in a local cloned FHS to offer the equivalent of NixOS/Guix shell; - easy creation of custom images, as easy as NixOS; - curated minimalistic desktop offer (Emacs/EXWM, i3 or another tiling WM, fluxbox with ALL relevant modern desktop stuff (like dunst already there for notifications, udiskie for manage removable storage, a nice network manager GUI of some kind, ...) and a good XFCE setup by default. There is no need for more, but there is a big need of sane defaults and meta-packages selections. These would be the real "basic stuff we need to succeed" like the SUN OpenSolaris Indiana move back then, ditching from the old SXDE/SXCE model for a modern FLOSS familiar one, but with the best tools GNU/Linux do not have.